The good folk at Amazon have recently informed me about a book called The Notebooks of Nehemiah Wallington, 1618-1654: A Selection by David Booy which comes out at the end of the month. See here. At £60 I can't see me buying it but Wallington looks an interesting character.Nehemiah Wallington (1598-1658) was a simple and firmly Puritan member of the Turners Guild in London. In extraordinary compliance with the Puritan dictum to lead a disciplined and examined life, he filled a number of notebooks with personal memoirs, political observations, and religious advice. He lived in the area of St Leonard’s, Eastcheap, London. His notes go back as far as 1623, and occasionally refer to much earlier dates. Without family connections of a higher social order, he was, at the same time, bookish in his tastes and a great reader of tracts, which he constantly quotes. His miscellaneous chronicle notes all kinds of unusual sights and occurences, and remarkable judgments of God, as, for instance, upon those that break the Sabbath day. Public events he notes in the same strain; on the meeting of the Long Parliament, he recognises the flow of God’s mercies in the judgments done upon Strafford and Laud; the troubles in Ireland are brought home to him by the sufferings there of his wife’s brother Zechariah; and the memoranda end with the execution of the king, on which he comments: "Whatever may be unjust with men, God is righteous and just in whatever he doth."
I'll give some extracts in the following post.
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